Saturday, October 15, 2016

Twitter Has Never Been Stronger—or Weaker - The New Yorker

Final paragraph from a timely Twitter reality check

"Yet it’s important to see that even these critiques of Twitter, sensible as they may be, are predicated on the idea that the proper goal for the company is to grow ever bigger. It’s a way of criticizing Twitter for not being Facebook or Google. But the truth is that not every company needs to be—or should be—huge. Nor is growth the only, or even the most important, metric by which to judge a company. Indeed, if you look at Twitter in terms of social impact and user engagement, you would say that the company is doing quite well and adding a great deal of value. The problem is that, for a publicly traded company, that value is irrelevant if it can’t be translated into continually rising profits. Going public pushes you to define yourself in the market’s terms rather than your own. As a private company, Twitter might be seen as a great success. As a public company, it’s a perpetual disappointment."
Twitter Has Never Been Stronger—or Weaker - The New Yorker

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